Bringing together a ton of updates from all the recent Beta releases, a big new release of SteamVR is out for everyone further refining the VR experience overall.

This time around SteamVR gained a simplified user experience, Valve said their aim here is to "more clearly and consistently communicate general VR and specific device status" along with an improved VR display view, with a new docked preview and full-screen mode. A bunch of icons were updated, with support for high-DPI displays and more.

For Valve's own Index HMD, there's now a Brightness Control setting for you to set in-headset. They also enabled column correction to help with vertical "screendoor", both of which need a firmware update.

Apart from that, there's a huge amount of bugs that were fixed across SteamVR, SteamVR Home, SteamVR Input, Lighthouse and so on. The Linux experience should also be better too, these changes were just for us:

Fixed various performance issues.

Fixed IVRCompositor::GetFrameTiming() reporting bad data when async mode was enabled, correcting the reporting of impossibly long frame times in the frame timing window.

With this big new release a question to our readers who have a VR unit: how is the experience now? Has the 1.7 release been a decent improvement? What issues does it still face on Linux? Let everyone know in the comments.

I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. See more from me

Not going to sugar coat the fact that you really should have an idea of what VR is before setting expectations but SteamVR for the most part works out of the box in Linux. There's also a lot, and I do mean a LOT of simply old data out there regarding the process. Once you get the lexicon down and know what to look for, the pace of VR is quite astounding.

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